Wednesday, 14 January 2015

FOR FUCHS SAKE

Anthony Vickers did a great interview with Uwe Fuchs in the Evening Gazette this week. Here's something I wrote about the German striker in another newspaper.

The chant
of "Sign him up, sign him up, sign him up" is generally only heard at
football grounds when the ball has struck a policeman on the head and rebounded
back on to the pitch. On the occasions when it isn't intended sarcastically, by
and large it ends in tears. When fans fall in love with a loan
signing it's like a kid bringing a stray puppy home. Something about the
situation just compels a manager to put his foot down and growl, "I don't
care how cute he looks running around with his tongue hanging out. He's going
right back where he came from".

Back in
January 1995, Middlesbrough took a former Germany Under-21 international on
loan from Kaiserslautern. Uwe Fuchs (In the UK always genteelly pronounced to rhyme with
dukes, though as a German friend of mine likes to point out "It's actually
Fux! Fux, fux, fux!") was a burly, dark-haired striker whose crazed
grimace suggested Les Dawson's Cosmo Smallpiece let loose at an Ann Summers
party.

Uwe
arrived at Ayresome Park via the intervention of Tony Woodcock who touted him
as "an English-style centre-forward", words which are to football
what the phrase "contains mechanical reclaimed meat" is to fine
dining.

Though at
times Uwe showed unexpected touches of finesse, generally speaking there was
something agricultural about him. He was one of those people who
look like they have straw in their hair even though they don't. He played like
he was in wellies. If George Best was the fifth Beatle, Uwe was the missing Wurzel. His technique was rustic in its simplicity: whenever he
received the ball he propelled it as hard as he could in the general direction
of the opposition net with whatever part of his body happened to be available
at the time. By such means he found the back of the net nine times in 13 games
and became a Teesside folk hero.

As if to
cement Uwe's place in legend, rumours began to circulate that the bucolic-looking
goal-getter was romantically entwined with local female celebrity, Jet from
Gladiators whose habit of turning cartwheels on the Ayresome Park pitch at
half-time had plainly overheated imaginations. One afternoon a
"Uwe Loves Jet" banner was unveiled in the Holgate End. And when Boro
winger John Hendrie appeared with a black eye the quickfire explanation offered
on the terraces was that the Scots' training ground remarks about the glamorous
gameshow personality had resulted in a scuffle (that Hendrie had actually
picked up the shiner in a bruising encounter with Barnsley's Malcolm Shotton –
a veteran defender who approached every game as if he had been parachuted
behind enemy lines – hardly mattered).

As the
season drew to a close, Uwe's appearances became more sporadic. His last game,
against Sheffield United, was not the finale anyone would have wanted. In a
gloomy mood after apparently being poked in the eye by a Blades centre-back, he
made a half-baked attempt to gain retribution via the sort of arse-first tackle
to which English-style centre-forwards are prone and was sent off.

Two days
after the end of the season, Bryan Robson announced that he would not be taking
up the £500,000 option to make Fuchs' move permanent. "He is not a
footballer," the Boro manager observed of the German, proving once again
how little the ability to bang the ball into the goal is valued by top-class
football people who really know the game inside out. And Bryan Robson.

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(Thanks to Kevin Donnelly for the photo)

About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.